#FREE DOWNLOAD PINNACLE STUDIO 9 WINDOWS#
We used a FireWire-attached Pinnacle MovieBox DV module for video capture and burned on 8X Verbatim DVD+R media.įirst, we verified that Studio 9.0 could be installed without incident on a clean copy of Windows XP Professional. Our testbed contained a 3.2GHz Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processor, an Intel 875 (Canterwood) chipset, a Plextor PX-708UF external FireWire DVD rewriter, and 1GB of Kingston Hyper-X DDR433 SDRAM.
#FREE DOWNLOAD PINNACLE STUDIO 9 SERIES#
We began our evaluation by subjecting Studio 9.0 to an elaborate series of stability tests. Studio 9.0's slick, mature interface makes it easy-even for newbies-to burn a disc or capture video from a VCR or camcorder, and it does so without limiting your ability to tailor each task to personal preferences. Pinnacle Studio 9.0's pioneering three-step approach to video production partitions projects into Capture, Edit, and Output phases, each of which you manage from a single screen. It's still not totally bug-free, but we can't think of a better sub-$100 tool for creating and distributing home movies or producing video content for a presentation, a DVD project, or a Web site. Better yet, it adds a raft of powerful new features that include audio- and video-cleanup tools, support for Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processors, and the ability to accept third-party plug-in tools. Pinnacle has obviously worked hard to address these problems, and our Pinnacle Studio 9.0 evaluation copy was the most stable version we've tested to date. Despite being one of the most versatile video-production packages in its class, its popularity has suffered from a reputation for maddening lockups and system conflicts. Of course, you get real time previews in almost all situations, but background rendering almost guarantees that a high-quality, finished version of your project is ready when you are.Pinnacle Studio is the kind of program that our readers love to hate. Our favorite new feature is one of our favorite features in Apple iMovie and Pinnacle Liquid Edition: background rendering. Trust us: Hollywood doesn't have a whole bunch of magic effects that you don't have to make its movies look great. There is no substitute for good shooting. It's not that these filters are bad, so much as we are unhappy with the unrealistic expectation that most people will have based on marketing claims. Likewise, the audio noise reduction filter is basically only for constant, low-level noise. Other "video cleaning" filters were nothing but empty promises. Image stabilization is decent, but it degrades the image significantly. The automatic white balance (color correction) tool is completely awesome. We really only liked about half of the new features, with the other half being the equivalent of a 700x digital zoom on a camcorder. We also found that these animations really dragged and stuttered on our 1GHz test machine, the slowest we tested. This is definitely something you'll have to get used to. Although each feature's interface is well designed, panels swoosh in and out as various buttons are clicked. There are so many filters and effects, that it can be a bit baffling as to exactly where features are hidden and the Toolbox metaphor doesn't always work. Beginner-level apps have so many features that they can rapidly get complex.